The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  “I came here to write a letter to the judge.”

  “You did not. Go ahead. Ask your question.”

  “It’s not relevant.”

  “Just ask. Do it.”

  “It’s not important. It’s nothing—”

  “I’d agree with that!” the lawyer cut in. “Immaterial.”

  “Shut up, Simon,” Faye said, then leveled her eyes at Samuel. “This question is everything. It’s why you’re here. Now why don’t you stop lying and ask it.”

  “Okay. Fine. I want to know. Why did you leave me?”

  And Samuel could feel the cry coming almost as soon as he said it: Why did you leave me? The question that had tormented his adolescence. He used to tell people she was dead. When they would ask about his mother, it was easier to say she’d died. Because when he told them the truth, they’d wonder why she left and where she’d gone and he didn’t know. Then they’d look at him funny, like it was his fault. Why did she leave him? It was the question that kept him awake night after night until he learned to swallow it and deny it. But asking the question now let it break back out—the shame and loneliness and self-pity washed over the question so that he was barely able to pronounce the last word before his throat tightened and he could feel himself on the verge of crying.

  They considered each other for a moment, Samuel and his mother, before the lawyer leaned across the table and whispered something into her ear. Then her defiance seemed to fizzle. She looked into her lap.

  “Perhaps we should return to our topic?” the lawyer said.

  “I think I deserve some answers,” Samuel said.

  “Perhaps we could get back to the subject of your letter, sir?”

  “I’m not expecting to be best friends,” Samuel said. “But answering a few questions? Is that too much to ask?”

  Faye crossed her arms and seemed to curl into herself. The lawyer stared at Samuel and waited. The sweat blobs on his forehead had grown thick and bulbous. At any moment, they could rain down into his eyes.

  “The thing about that article in Nature?” Faye said. “The one about memory? What really struck me was how our memories are sewn into the meat of the brain. Everything we know about our past is literally etched into us.”

  “Okay,” Samuel said. “What’s your point?”

  She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples, a gesture of impatience and irritation that Samuel recognized from his childhood.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Every memory is really a scar.”

  The lawyer slapped the top of his briefcase and said, “Okay! I think we’re done here!”

  “You haven’t answered any of my questions,” Samuel said. “Why did you leave me? What happened to you in Chicago? Why did you keep it secret? What have you been doing all these years?”

  And Faye looked at him then, and all the hardness in her body dissolved. She gave him that same look she’d given him the morning she disappeared, her face full of grief.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “I need this,” Samuel said. “You don’t even understand how much. I need to know.”

  “I’ve given you all I can.”

  “But you haven’t told me anything. Please, why did you go?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “It’s private.”

  “Private? Seriously?”

  Faye nodded and looked at the tabletop. “It’s private,” she said again.

  Samuel crossed his arms. “You goad me into asking this question and then you say it’s private? Fuck you.”

  Then the lawyer was gathering his things, turning off the microphone, sweat dropping onto his shirt collar. “Thank you so much, Professor Anderson, for all your efforts,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you could get any lower, Faye, but congratulations,” Samuel said, standing up. “Really, you’re like a virtuoso. A maestro of being awful.”

  “We’ll be in touch!” the lawyer said. He ushered Samuel toward the front door, pushed him from behind with a warm, wet hand. “We will be in contact to touch base about how we can move forward.” He opened the door and walked Samuel through it. Liquid BBs hung on to the skin of his forehead. The area under his armpit was now a soggy mess, as if he’d spilled a movie-theater-size drink there. “We’re very excited to read your letter to Judge Brown,” he said. “And good day!”

  He closed the door behind Samuel and locked it.

  All the way out of the building, and for the whole long ride back through Chicago and into the suburbs, Samuel felt like he was going to crumble. He remembered the advice from those websites: Have a support network. He needed to talk to someone. But who? Not his father, clearly. Not anyone from work. The only people he regularly communicated with were his Elfscape friends. So, once home, he logged on. He was greeted by the usual barrage of Hey Dodger! and Good to see ya! He asked a question in guild chat: Any of you Chicago folks want to meet up tonight? I feel like going out.

  Which was met with an embarrassed silence. Samuel understood he’d crossed a boundary. He’d asked to meet in real life, a request usually made only by creeps and stalkers. He was about to apologize and tell them all to forget it when Pwnage, their brilliant leader, the guild’s Elfscape savant, finally, mercifully, wrote back.

  Sure. I know a place.

  2

  LAURA POTTSDAM SAT in the frightening office of the university dean, explaining exactly what had transpired between herself and Samuel. “He told me I didn’t have a learning disability,” Laura said. “He told me I just wasn’t very smart.”

  “Oh my goodness,” the dean said, looking stricken. Her office shelves were filled mostly with books about the Black Death, her walls decorated with old-looking illustrations of people suffering from boils or lesions or being piled into wheelbarrows, dead. Laura had not thought any wall art was more insufferable than her roommate’s giant weight-loss calendar, but the dean’s apparent interest in the history of open sores proved her totally wrong.

  “Samuel really said, out loud, that you weren’t smart?”

  “It was a pretty big blow to my self-esteem.”

  “Yes, I’d imagine.”

  “I am an elite college student with a perfect GPA. He can’t tell me I’m not smart.”

  “I think you’re very smart, Laura.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you should know I take this very seriously.”

  “I might also mention that Professor Anderson sometimes curses in class. It’s really distracting and offensive.”

  “Okay, here’s what we can do,” the dean said. “Why don’t you rewrite your Hamlet paper for a new grade. Meanwhile, I’ll smooth things over with Professor Anderson. Does that sound like a plan?”

  “Yes, that sounds like a great plan.”

  “And if there’s anything else I need to know, please call me directly.”

  “Okay,” Laura said, and she walked out of the administration building feeling the bright, buoyant warmth that accompanies victory.

  It was a feeling that lasted only briefly, only until she cracked open her Shakespeare and sat on her dorm-room floor looking forlornly at all those words and realized she was right back where she started: trying to complete yet another worthless assignment for yet another worthless class, Intro to Lit, one of five classes she was enrolled in this semester, all of which were, in her opinion, bullshit. Just totally stupid time sucks that had nothing to do with real life, was what she thought about college classes, so far. And by “real life” she meant the tasks she’d be asked to perform upon graduation with a bachelor’s degree in business, tasks she couldn’t even really guess at now since she hadn’t taken any advanced communication and marketing classes and hadn’t held an internship or “real job” ever, unless you counted her high-school gig working part-time at the concession stand at a second-run movie theater, where she learned several important lessons about workplace etiquette from a thirty-two-year-old assistant manager who liked staying after hours to smoke
weed and play strip poker with the pretty teenage girls he always hired, which required of her a careful social negotiation to continue having access to the weed without doing anything so retrograde she couldn’t show her face at work the next day. But even if this was the only quote-unquote work experience she’d ever had, she was still pretty sure her inevitably successful future career in marketing and communications would not require the stupid shit she was currently learning in college.

  Like Hamlet. She was trying to read Hamlet, trying to form a thought for an essay she had to rewrite about Hamlet. But the thing that was more interesting to her right now was a fistful of paper clips that she tossed lightly into the air and then watched as they bounced and scattered all over the linoleum of her dorm-room floor. This was more fun than reading Hamlet. Because even though every paper clip was shaped exactly like every other paper clip, they bounced in chaotic, random, unduplicatable ways. Why didn’t they bounce exactly the same? Why didn’t they all land in the same place? Plus there was that delicious click-chhh sound when they all hit the floor and slid. She had lofted the paper clips into the air roughly fifteen to twenty times in the last few minutes—a pretty transparent Hamlet-reading stalling maneuver, she had to admit—when her phone dinged. A new message!

  Heeeee­eeeee­eey honey

  From Jason. And she could tell by the several iterations of the letter e that he was feeling that very special urgent way tonight. Boyfriends were so transparent sometimes.

  Hey! :-D

  The reason college was so stupid was due to learning things she would never need in life, ever. Like knowledge of Greek statuary, for example, such as she was memorizing for the Intro to Humanities class that was required of every student and that the university offered online. This was such a dumb waste of time because she was sure when she interviewed for her first real job they would not show her flash cards of statues and ask “What myth does this represent?,” which was what she had to do in the timed two-minute weekly quizzes the class required and that were such a total joke—

  Her phone chirped. It was an update on iFeel, the excellent new app that was the social media darling du jour among the college set. Laura’s friends were all on it, and used it obsessively, and would abandon it as soon as it was discovered by the late-adopters, meaning old people.

  Laura looked at her phone. iFeel happy tonight!!! one of her friends had posted. It was Brittany, who had so far survived the several purges Laura had made to her Alert List.

  The phone asked: Do you want to Ignore, Respond, or Autocare?

  Laura selected Autocare. Placed the phone back on the floor, on the paper clips.

  What had she been thinking about? Right, the art quizzes, which were a total joke because all she had to do was scroll through the quiz taking screen-grabs along the way and then unplug her modem, which the test interpreted as a “crash” or “network failure” (i.e., not her fault), thus allowing her to take the quiz again. So she looked up all the answers and plugged in the modem and aced the quiz and didn’t have to think about Greek statuary for another week.

  Then there was biology, which pretty much made Laura gag just thinking about it. Because she was pretty sure the first week of her powerful marketing and communications job that she would someday have would not require her to identify the chemical chain reaction that converted a photon of light to photosynthesized sugar, such as she was currently memorizing in her Intro to Biology class that she was stupidly forced to take in order to satisfy a science requirement even though hello? she wasn’t going to be a scientist? Plus the professor was so dry and boring and the lectures so unbearable—

  Her phone dinged again. A message from Brittany: Thanx girl!! Responding to whatever message iFeel selected to Autocare with, obviously. And because Laura was in the middle of studying and trying really hard to read Hamlet she decided not to engage and instead sent back the universal glyph signifying the end of a conversation:

  :)

  Anyway the biology lectures were so unbearable she’d begun paying her roommate twenty bucks a week to record herself reading aloud from the important parts of the textbook so Laura could listen to the recording during the biweekly chapter tests, when she sat inconspicuously next to the wall about halfway down in the three-hundred-person lecture hall and slipped one small earbud into the wall-side ear and leaned against the wall and listened to her roommate reading the chapter while scanning the test for keywords, vaguely impressed by her own multitasking skills and her ability to pass the test without ever studying once.

  “You’re not using this to cheat, are you?” her roommate asked a few weeks into the operation.

  “No. It’s so I can study. At the gym,” Laura said.

  “Because cheating is wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’ve never seen you exercise.”

  “I do exercise.”

  “I’m at the gym all the time and I’ve never seen you there.”

  “Well, rats’ eggs on you!” Laura said, which was something her mother always said instead of cursing. Something else her mother always said is Don’t let anyone EVER bully you or make you feel bad about yourself, and at that moment her roommate was making her feel very bad indeed, which was why instead of apologizing Laura said, “Listen, feeb, if you haven’t seen me at the gym it’s ’cuz some of us don’t need to be there as long as you do,” because her roommate was, let’s face it, objectively morbidly (almost fascinatingly) obese. She had legs like sacks of potatoes. For real.

  The word “feeb” was something she made up on the spot and felt pretty proud of, actually, how sometimes a nickname can capture a person’s essence like that.

  Her phone dinged.

  Whatcha doin 2nite?

  Jason again, probing. He was never as obvious as when he wanted to sext.

  Homework :’(

  The only class Laura was taking this semester that related in any way to her future was her one business class, macroeconomics, which was so abstractly mathematical and had basically nothing to do with the “human element” of business, which was really why she was going into this field at all, because she liked people and she was good with people and she maintained a huge cavalry of online contacts who texted her and messaged her several times daily through the many social media sites she kept a presence on, which made her phone ding all day, repeatedly, the sound like a spoon lightly tapped against a crystal goblet, these pure high singing notes that made her feel bolts of Pavlovian happiness.

  And that was why she was a business major.

  But macroeconomics was so stupid and boring and unnecessary for her future career that she did not feel at all bad collaborating with a boy from her orientation group, a graphic design major and Photoshop artist who could, for example, scan the label of a Lipton Green Tea bottle, erase the ingredients list (a surprisingly long and sciencey thing for something that claimed to be “tea”), and replace the ingredients with an answer key to the test—all the formulas and concepts they were supposed to have memorized—matching exactly the original Lipton typeface and color so that there was no way the teacher would ever know she had all the test answers in front of her except by reading the ingredients list on her Lipton Green Tea. Fat chance, in other words. This boy was quasi-repaid with hugs that were maybe a little too tight and too close, as well as bi-semester visits to his dorm room downstairs when she “forgot” the key to her own room while going for a shower and so had nothing to do but crash at his place wearing only her favorite tiny towel.

  Did Laura feel bad about all this cheating? She did not. That the school made it so easy to cheat meant, for her, that they tacitly approved of it, and moreover it was actually the school’s fault for making her cheat by (a) giving her so many opportunities, and (b) making her take so many bullshit courses.

  Example: Hamlet. Trying to read stupid Hamlet again—

  Her phone chirped. Another iFeel update. It was Vanessa: iFeel scared about all this terrible economic news!!! Which was ex
actly the kind of boring update that got you taken right off the Alert List. Laura selected Ignore. One strike against Vanessa.

  Anyway trying to read Hamlet and identify “logical fallacies” in Hamlet’s course of action, which was such bullshit because she knew for a fact that when she interviewed for executive vice president of communications and marketing for a major corporation they would not ask her about Hamlet. They would not ask her about logical fallacies. She had tried to read Hamlet but it kept getting all gummed up in her brain:

  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,

  Seem to me all the uses of this world!

  Fie on’t! ah fie!

  What the fuck is that?

  Who talks like that? And who said this was great literature? Because mostly from what she could tell in the few places where Shakespeare actually wrote in English was that Hamlet’s just stupid and depressed, which she was like if you’re sad and depressed and cheesed about something it’s probably your own dumb fault and why did she have to sit here and listen to you wallow in it? Plus there was the matter of her phone, which chimed and squawked and dinged roughly ten times per soliloquy and made her feel mentally encumbered trying to read stupid Hamlet knowing there was an update just sitting there waiting for her. It was a chiming sound for a text message but a birdlike chirping sound whenever her closest seventy-five friends updated their iFeel status, was how she’d programmed the phone. At first, she set it to alert her when any of her iFeel friends posted anything, but she quickly realized this was untenable given her thousand-plus friend roll, making the phone look something like a stock ticker and sound like an Audubon sanctuary. So she culled the Alert List to a more manageable seventy-five, though this list was a fluid, ever-changing one as she spent at least a couple of hours weekly reevaluating it and swapping some people out for others on the bubble using an intuitive sort of regression analysis based on several metrics, including the interestingness and frequency of the friend’s recent posts, the number of hilarious pictures recently uploaded and tagged, the presence of anything political-ish in the friend’s status stream (political statements usually caused bickering, so anyone chronically guilty was ejected from the top seventy-five), and finally the friend’s ability to find and link to worthwhile internet videos, since finding, in any consistent manner, good internet videos was a skill like panning for gold, she thought, and so it was important to keep in one’s top list a couple of these people who could spot cool videos and memes before they went viral, which made her feel good vis-à-vis her place in the culture, seeing these things a day or a week before everyone else in the world. It made her feel like she was on the leading edge of everything. It was approximately the same feeling she had walking around the mall and seeing how every clothing store reflected exactly what she wanted right back at her. The photographs, poster-size, life-size, some even blown up bigger than that, showed attractive young girls just like her, in groups of attractive and racially kind of diverse friends that looked just like her friends, having fun in outdoor settings that she and her friends would totally go to if there were anything like that around here. And the feeling she had when she saw these images was that she was wanted. Everyone wanted her to like them. Everyone wanted to give her exactly what she desired. She never felt as secure as she did in dressing rooms rejecting clothes for not being good enough for her, breathing in the deep, gluey smell of the mall.